Johnny Guitar was shot in the dramatic landscape of Sedona, Arizona, which before this new Blu-ray release featuring the original 1.66:1 aspect ratio could be glimpsed only at the edges of the frame. While the terrain is still mere background to a melodrama of loyalty and desire, the film’s coloring and staging make much more sense when complemented by the vista of towering, sculptured red mesas.
Film critic Robin Wood once described The Lady Eve as a “perfect film.” Peter Bogdanovich in his introduction to the new Criterion Blu-ray says that “you can’t get a better movie,” and indeed it is a standout comedy in Preston Sturges’s short career, in Barbara Stanwyck’s long career, and among early Forties studio releases. The writing is sharp, smart, and loaded with double entendres that provocatively challenge the mores of the Production Code. Sturges’s script, very loosely based on a story by Monckton Hoffe, takes an elliptical, allegorical detour through the Garden of Eden, aka the Amazon, where there are women, but none of them “white.”